Word Mini-games

[DavidRieman]

For the road-map, we figured that mini-games would probably land in the v1.1 time frame: They're not really MVP. But they are something that could make for a good demonstration of WheelMUD plug-and-play modularity, which would be a great thing to help call attention to the apparent strengths of the framework, especially showing how a library could be highly independent of the core code - something you can just "drop in" to add capabilities to an existing MUD with minimal integration effort.

With the recent craze for games like Wordle lately, I realized that games like this would work really well with the terminal format. And would probably be fun to code. So I wanted to get this idea tracked. Making some kind of Wordle/Nerdle-like mini-game(s) could make for a nice demonstration of our modularity.

Mini-games can take on different forms. Although some could be "complex" (say, involving a series of rooms for like a lazer-tag mini-game), here are a couple basic modular styles that could be easier to "drop in" without much OLC follow-up needed:

• Something you can play at a "game table" object, whose Behavior is provided in the module.
• Something you can play by simply being logged in, whose global command is provided in the module.

While the former would be well suited to very collaborative or competitive mini-games (especially when they represent a physical game like a card game or board game being played in the MUD)... the latter is something that such mini-games could be well suited to. But a clever encapsulation of the game rules from the command system exposure, could probably implement both, if we really want, with minimal code overlap. (I think we should keep it simple though.)

Basically I see the experience being something like this:
Let's assume a "daily seeded game" format like these games usually use, to encourage people to compare their success with, like "whoa I got it in 2 guesses!" Player enters a command like "whatevle start" to start the day's game. If the player doesn't have a "WhatevleRecordBehavior" then it adds one to the player for keeping track of today's game state. If the player's WhatevleRecordBehavior last game date is not today (or doesn't exist), discard old in-progress state and set it up with a new game state. This will mainly track their short list of guesses. Designing this state into a Behavior on the player means it will automatically persist with the player, with no special code, playing to WheelMUD's persistence strengths. The player can issue a command like "whatevle guess (word or equation or whatever is being guessed), and the command response would print out the table of progress. If the player has ASCII colors and symbols, we can make good use of coloring things in the response to look just like such games usually do - else fall back to a safe vanilla response that will work for vanilla clients with different symbols to represent hits / location-misses / full-misses. Maybe the package would also have a little side command like "whatevle boast" which would produce output to the current room like "Dude guessed today's whatevle in 2 guesses! (output sequence here)" making use of output gating features to print the best version of that to each person in the room (whether colored or not) as appropriate.